Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan (25 September 1866-4 December 1945) was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and embryologist from Columbia University. His work on studying hereditary transmission mechanisms in fruit flies led to him winning the Nobel Prize in 1933.

Biography
Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1866, the nephew of Confederate general John Hunt Morgan and the great-grandson of Francis Scott Key. He studied at Johns Hopkins University and went on to become a professor at Columbia University, and, in 1908, he began experimenting with the fruit fly. He bred a single white-eyed male fly with a red-eyed female. All the offspring produced by the union had red eyes, and he bred male and female siblings, resulting in some offspring with red eyes and white eyes. He established a theory of heredity that was based on the idea that genes, arranged on the chromosomes, carry hereditary factors that are expressed in different combinations when coupled with the genes of a mate. In 1933, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of hereditary transmission mechanisms, and he wrote a total of 22 books and 370 scientific papers during his lifetime.